Summary:

Amazon is adding two new sources of renewable energy farms in the United States and in Ireland. The Ireland project will be located in Cork, Ireland and is going to be a wind energy farm and the one in the United States is will be located in Pittsylvania County, Virginia and will be a mas solar farm with 23.2 megawatts of capacity.

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Amazon Adds Two New Sources of Renewable Energy Projects

Tech giant Amazon is to invest in two new sources of renewable energy projects in the U.S. and Ireland. In an announcement Thursday, the firm said the projects – in Pittsylvania County, Virginia and Cork, Ireland – were expected to commence production in 2020.

The project in Ireland will be a solar wind power energy farm with 23.2 megawatts (MW) of capacity and is set to generate 68,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy per year. The facility in Virginia, a mass solar farm, will have 45 MW of capacity of solar panels and produce an expected 100,000 MWh of solar energy each year.

Capacity refers to the maximum amount that solar panel installations can produce, not what they are currently generating.

The facilities, which will take the company’s number of sources of renewable energy projects to 66, will be used to supply energy to data centers for Amazon Web Services. In the U.S., the company says its solar power projects have offset the carbon dioxide equivalent of over 200 million miles of truck deliveries.

“Major investments in sources of renewable energy are a critical step to address our carbon footprint globally,” Amazon’s director of sustainability, Kara Hurst, said in a statement. “We will continue to invest in these projects, and look forward to additional investments this year and beyond,” Hurst added.

A number of major businesses are turning to sources of renewable energy to power their operations.

Last week, a report from the Solar Energy Industries Association said that Apple was the business with the most installed solar capacity in the U.S. The Solar Means Business Report for 2018 looked at both off and on-site solar panel installations at businesses in the U.S.

Apple, with 393.3 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity of solar panels, took the top spot. The company says its headquarters in Cupertino, California, is powered by 100% sources of renewable energy from “multiple sources”. These include an on-site 17 MW rooftop solar panel installations and 4 MW of biogas fuel cells.

Amazon and Target made up the top three of the SEIA’s list with 329.8 MW and 242.4 MW of installed capacity respectively. Other firms in the top 10 include major businesses such as Walmart, Google and real estate investment trust firm Prologis.

According to the SEIA, corporate solar adoption has “surged” over the last few years. Over half of the total capacity of solar panels in the U.S. has been installed since 2016.

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